Lawrence A. Rowe

Biographical Information

Professor Lawrence A. Rowe retired in June 2003 after twenty-seven
years at U.C. Berkeley to pursue various activities including
the development of streaming media software,
consulting with multimedia research laboratories, and
investing in startup companies.
He was the founding director of the Berkeley Multimedia
Research Center (BMRC) created in 1995 to explore the
application of multimedia technology to education and research.
BMRC taught classes on multimedia authoring, established and operated
authoring studios and distributed collaboration and distance learning
classrooms, and provided technical support on a variety
of issues relating to multimedia systems and applications.
BMRC closed in 2002 when funding to support the center ended.

While at the University, Professor Rowe headed the research group
that produced the Berkeley MPEG-1 Tools (1991-5),
the Berkeley Multimedia, Interfaces, and Graphics (MIG) Seminar Webcast
(1995-2002), and
the Open Mash Streaming Media Toolkit (1999-2003).
He was also responsible for the development and deployment of the Berkeley
Lecture Webcasting System.

Earlier in his career he worked on database systems and development tools
that were commercialized by the original Ingres Corporation (1980-1990).
He received several "Best Paper" awards. And, a paper he co-authored with
Dr. Michael Stonebraker titled "Design of POSTGRES" published in 1986
received the "1996 ACM SSIGMOD Test of Time Award" for a paper that had
the most impct over the decade after which it first appeared.
A paper published with his students at the first ACM Multimedia Conference
in 1993 was selected as one of the papers having a significant
impact on the research community over the following decade.
A revised version of the paper was published in the inaugural issue of the
ACM Trans. on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications in 2005
showing the impact ten years of improvements in processing and storage had
on the results published in 1993.

Professor Rowe served as President of FX Palo Alto Research
Laboratory (FXPAL) from April 2007 to September 2013 and
Chairman/CEO from October 2013 to December 2014 when he retired.
FXPAL is a multimedia research laboratory owned by Fuji
Xerox located in Palo Alto CA. The laboratory focuses on multimedia
systems and applications, interactive multimedia document authoring,
storage, search, and analysis, and distributed collaboration.
The core competencies of the lab are human-computer interfaces and
multimedia technology. Recently, we have been exploring
cloud computing and mobile applications.

Professor Rowe received a BA degree in Mathematics and a PhD in
Information and Computer Science from the University of California at
Irvine in 1970 and 1976, respectively.
He is an ACM Fellow , past chair (1998-2003) of the ACM Special Interest Group
on Multimedia (SIGMM), and served on numerous administrate and policy
committees at the Berkeley campus, the University of California, and
the U.S. Government.

He consulted with and served on the Technical Advisory
Boards of numerous companies, co-founded several companies including
Ingres Corporation, NCast Corporation, and Orinda Software, Inc., and
served on the Board of Directors of Ingres Corporation, NCast Corporation,
and Siemens Technology-to-Business.

Professor Rowe received many awards and honors. He was a co-recipient
of the UC Technology Leadership Council 2002 Larry L. Sautter Award for
Innovation in Information Technology for his leadership of the development
of the Berkeley
Lecture Webcasting System. He received the Donald Bren
School of Information and Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award
from U.C. Irvine in 2007. And, in 2009 he received the ACM SIGMM
Technical Achievement Award that recognizes lifetime research
accomplishments in multimedia systems and applications.

Contact Information

The best way to contact me is by email (larowe at rowehome "dot" net)
or by phone (925-218-2221).
If you are calling on behalf of a law firm looking for potential
expert witnesses, please do not call me. I am not interested -
you will just be wasting your time and mine.

Miscellaneous Information

The BMRC Website was shutdown in late 2009.

Open Mash Streaming Media Toolkit -
development on this system has ended. Some versions of the code
are still available on
SourceForge.

Berkeley MPEG-1 Video Tools -
We developed the tools in the early 1990's to assess the suitable of desktop
computers for software encoding and decoding MPEG video. These
tools included the first widely distributed MPEG-1 video decoder
(mpeg_play), encoder (mpeg_encode), and several tools to
analyze how a particular video was encoded. We do not support these tools,
but they continue to be popular for reasons at which I can only guess.
Most desktop systems have better players and encoders available, but you
are welcome to do with the code whatever you want. We published several
papers describing the software including benchmarks on systems available
at the time and completed a revision
of the original 1993 ACM Multimedia paper that is available
here
(ACM Digital Library)
that appeared in the inaugural issue of ACM TOMCCAP
available here
(ACM Digital Library).

Berkeley Lecture Webcasts (BIBS System) -
We began regularly schedule webcasts of the
Berkeley MIG Seminar in January 1995 and continued every week
through December 2002 except for the 2001-2 Academic Year when
I was on sabbatical.
Sadly, both the MIG Seminar and the class lectures we produced with the
Berkeley Internet Broadcasting System (BIBS) from Fall 1998 semester
through the Spring 2001 semester are no longer accessible.

The report written in 2001 that described the system and statistics
on the operation of the system by BMRC are available
here. The report includes a description of
the system and our experience running it from when it began in Spring 1999
until it was transfered in the Fall 2001 semester to the
Educational Technology Services
organization on the Berkeley campus. They continue to produce video
and audio webcasts of lectures.
You can view recent lectures at their website at
webcast.berkeley.edu

Before I returned to work, I read many interesting books on
technology topics, particularly telecommunications
and broadcasting, and on investing and current and historical events.
Here is a reading list with comments.